Wholemeal Bread

For my first Short and Tweet effort I’m afraid I’m not breaking new ground. In fact, it’s not even that much of an effort as this is our regular loaf, and a fairly easy one at that. So I’m being a a bit lazy here. However, I will say that it’s a cracker – no it isn’t, it’s a bread! arf. – and it’s the loaf that decisively ended our Hovis habit. And when I’m busy/not in the mood/wanting to feel less of a hausfrau, the man of the house, who loves to eat but is not baking-obsessed, feels confident enough to make it without having to fear my control demons coming after him. Result!

So these pics are of a loaf we made together; I started and rose and shaped the dough, he floured, slashed and whacked it in the oven. Detail-wise, the recipe I use is actually Felicity Cloake’s ‘Perfect’ adaptation, which has about 15% white flour, and the knead timings are different to Dan’s book. Either way, it’s a great, pretty-much-unscrewuppable loaf.

Update: The collected results are in; check everyone’s loaves at the Short and Tweet site.

Free food from nature: Apple-cheddar pie

The house we rent has the most miraculous apple tree. Last year, we harvested buckets and buckets of huge red-green apples. They grew so tightly on the branch that, in removing one, three or four more would fall to the ground. There were too many even for the worms to keep up with. At the end of the harvest, though, the gardener came by and pollarded its branches back to the quick and, I’m sorry to say, this year there were no apples. I’ve been obsessively monitoring and scavenging other peoples, and finding ways to use any and all that come to me so as not to waste the resource (although I understand that returning to the soil and providing food for animals are also legitimate uses of the resource). It helps that it’s the Jewish New Year, for which, at least in the Eastern European tradition, eating apples is auspicious for a round and sweet year to come. And I enjoy the English pride in local heirloom apple varieties, similar to what I grew up with in the northeastern US, and with some overlap – but I’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of tasting all the colorfully named fruits.

One of my favourite ways to eat apples is with sharp cheddar. I’d be happy to make a daily habit of lunch consisting of alternating slices of apple and cheese. But variety is good, too, and baked goods are another perfectly good way to eat up a glut (whatever that is) of apples and, if you’re so lucky, cheese. Hence this pie, based on Williams-Sonoma’s recipe. I like to use a good Canadian or Welsh cheddar as many of the cheaper English varieties have a certain flavour-note that I don’t get on with. Fortunately my mother-in-law’s tree was heaving with apples this year, so when we brought her back to Cambridge – with a bucketful – it seemed like a good opportunity to try the recipe which, while a bit long and fiddly, benefits from the detail.

With its crisp, flaky, cheesy crust and melting apples, this pie did not last long.

Apple-cheddar pie

Ingredients:
For the dough:
315 g (2.5 cups) plain (all-purpose) flour
2 tsp salt
1 Tbs sugar
170 g sharp cheddar cheese, finely grated
225 g (2 sticks) frozen unsalted butter, cut
 into 1/2-inch dice
75 to 120 ml (1/3 to 1/2 cup) ice water
For the filling:
1.75 kg (3.5 lbs) cooking apples, peeled, cored and cut
 into slices 1/4 inch thick
1 1/2 lb. Granny Smith apples, peeled, cored 
 and cut into slices 1/4 inch thick
3/4 cup sugar
1 Tbsp fresh lemon juice
3/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp salt
1 Tbsp unsalted butter
3 Tbsp cornstarch
2 Tbsp cream

Directions:
Dough:
In the food processor bowl – without processing, yet – add the flour, salt, sugar and cheddar, breaking apart any large clumps of cheese. Put the diced butter on top and put bowl in the freezer for 10 min.

When the mixture is chilled, return the bowl to the machine and pulse until combined, about 25 to 30 pulses. Add 1/3 cup of the ice water and pulse twice. The dough should hold together when squeezed with your fingers. If it is crumbly, add 1 Tbsp more water at a time, pulsing twice after each. Divide dough in half and shape each half into a disk. Wrap the disks separately in cling film and refrigerate for a good hour or more; the dough is much easier to work with if quite cold.

Filling:
While preparing your apples, have lemon juice ready in the bottom of a large bowl, and toss the slices in the lemon juice as you go along. Add sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt, and stir to combine. Let stand at room temperature for 30 minutes to 1 hour.

Rolling out the bottom crust:
While the apples etc. are macerating, remove one dough disk from the refrigerator. Flour a smooth work surface. Peel back the cling film partway, and place dough on the work surface. With the cling film on top, roll the dough into a 12-inch round about 3/16 inch thick, evening out by hand any uneven edges. Scraping it up if you need to, drape the rolled-out dough onto your rolling pin; transfer it to an ungreased pie dish and press into the dish Trim the edges if needed to leave a 1/2-inch overhang. Cover with plastic wrap and chill for 30 minutes.

Preheat oven to 200°C (400°F).

Filling, continued:

Reduce the apple/lemon juice as follows, to produce a glaze for the apples: Remove the juice by draining apples through a sieve over a small saucepan, then transfer the apples to a large bowl. Heat the juices over medium-high, add 1 Tbsp butter and cook until reduced to 1/3 cup, 3 to 5 minutes, then remove from heat. Sprinkle the cornstarch over the apples and toss to combine, then stir in the reduced juices. Transfer apples with juice to the pie shell.

Rolling out the top crust:
As above, roll out the remaining dough disk into a 12-inch round about 3/16 inch thick. Drape the dough over the apples and press gently to eliminate air pockets. Trim the dough flush with the rim of the dish. Fold the bottom crust over the top crust and squidge the top and bottom together as decoratively as you’d like; I did it with my fingers. Cut slits in the top of the crust to allow steam to escape. Brush the top of the crust with the cream.

Bake for 20 minutes at 200°C. Cover the edges and top with aluminum foil if they begin to get too dark. Reduce the oven temperature to 175°C and continue to bake until the apples are easily pierced with a knife and crust is nicely browned, 65 to 70 minutes more. Transfer to a wire rack and let cool for at least 1 1/2 hours before serving, or eat warm, with poured cream or vanilla ice cream.

How to make a falafel dinner

RYMFB4ZQPTT6 Falafel, in the Middle East, is a stealth vegetarian meal. Everyone likes it (at least, everyone I’ve met), it’s the perfect street food, it’s so tasty that no one misses the meat, and it’s a great way to get extra vegetables into your diet.

There’s an ongoing argument about the provenance of falafel – a fried, seasoned ball of ground chickpeas – and who owns the original idea, but it’s a basic staple of the eastern Mediterranean. Some of the best falafel is found in grittier areas of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The concept is thus: you order a whole or a half sandwich, and choose from toppings to stuff precariously into your pita. Those toppings include a rainbow of shredded or chopped salads, fried eggplant, chips (in the British sense), tahini sauce, and a super-hot Yemeni condiment called zhug, which I think you have to be Yemeni to pronounce correctly.

Oh, the memories. No, I won’t tell you how old those memories are, but I did live in Israel for 10 months in my early 20s so you can do the math if you have the right additional info.

The international chain Maoz, now in big cities in Europe and North America, is very, very good, but it’s fun and possible to have a real falafel experience at home, from scratch. (That said, I tried making falafel recently when I was cooking for myself – I’ve done it before, I swear – and dangit! they fell apart. It is a bit of a stretch to try and nail fresh pita bread AND fresh falafel AND two or three toppings by one’s self in a few hours. The pics are from a more relaxed and successful attempt.)

Here are the elements:

Tahini sauce – tahini from a jar (the Lebanese kind is best), thinned with water and lemon juice and with some chopped garlic mixed in, like hummous without the chickpeas
‘Israeli salad’ – simply chopped cucumbers and tomatoes
Pitta or pita bread – Worth making yourself, I swear, and surprisingly easy. Try this recipe if you’re used to working with cup measurements, and this one if you prefer weights and have a gram scale; I’ve had good success with both. Whether or not you make them in advance, wrap them in a towel as they come out of the oven to keep them soft.
Chips or french fries – not a requirement, but I love them, and they are a traditional falafel stuffing in Israel
Falafel – ah. Here’s where I have to be a bit bashful and confess that I tend to use a mix, as falafel made thus are quick, tasty, and reliable. I promise that I will continue to work toward my own recipe for falafel from scratch. Watch this space! Update: Here is a post from Zeb Bakes full of super-useful tips on rolling your own, from dried fava beans. I think that means I’m next!
Zhug – it really does help set off the flavours to include something spicy. Here is a legit one from The Atlantic so as to avoid linking to one out there that seems to have been ripped off without permission.
Eggplant – thin, fried (or oven fried) slices are a very nice addition.

You can also look around for vinegary pickled cucumbers or other vegetables, and maybe throw together a salad of shredded carrots or beets.

Enjoy and let us know how it goes!

RYMFB4ZQPTT6

Our own potatoes! And…?

Our first batch of King Edward potatoes seemed to be reaching the end of their growing season, so I thought I’d dig some, and ask Mr Veggie Box to bring us extra mushrooms this week in place of a portion of potatoes too far. Scrabbling blindly around in the dirt, my fingers pulled up something that was the right size and shape…but turned out to be green. Not sickly, aged-potato, solanine green, either, but proper lime-green. I think I can guess what it is and how it got there (I haven’t cut it open yet). Your thoughts?

A mini-honeymoon in Amsterdam

I always thought that a proper honeymoon was supposed to involve beaches and sleeping in a lot. But then I also thought that weddings were supposed to involve big, white dresses, ice sculptures of swans, and family rows, and I knew we weren’t having any of that either, so why sign up for a stereotypical honeymoon? Amsterdam seemed interesting, was quick to fly to, and neither of us had been there – oh, and it was possible we might find something good to eat, even if it was just classic Old World bread and cheese. So, done.

As it turned out there was plenty of good stuff to eat. The Time Out guidebook offered an enticing hint: that there were substantial snacks to be had, so that you wouldn’t starve between meals. One dilemma was that I have really been trying to lose a bit of weight. One the one hand we were on holiday so a bit of indulgence seemed OK, but on the other I did find myself making mental notes of calories consumed versus hours walked. And walk we did, until our feet hurt, although lot of that walking involved tracking down recommended food stops. Well, that is who I am.

Houses on the edge of the Vondelpark. You know you want to live there.

Tuesday evening, after getting settled in our hotel and having a quick wander in the Vondelpark, we hopped a tram to the Pijp, where efforts at upward mobility clashed gently with bohemian coffeehouse and immigrant cultures. This was evident in stoned graffiti on building-site plywood – for example, “A city sodomized by tentacles of distrust” – across from a pedestrian-only block filled with a variety of relaxed natives and tourists scattered amongst sidewalk cafés. Here, we learned our first bit of food-Dutch: Vlaamse friet, or Belgian (Flemish) fries, on offer alongside falafel. Yes, please. The menu had a bit of Hebrew on it, so I asked the guy in front of us if it was an Israeli shop; he told us most of the falafel shops in Amsterdam were run by Indians and, sure enough, some of the salads in the falafel bar had a touch of cumin and coriander seed, not what you’d find in Tel Aviv. Good though. More difficult to figure out was the long list of friet toppings; I picked the one that seemed most likely to be mayo, and it was. A satisfying snack indeed; we never got around to dinner that night, but after much walking we did succumb in the hotel bar to a (bad) slice of ‘New York’ cheesecake, which they seemed a bit too eager to get rid of.

Typical shop in the Pijp.

Breakfast was not included in our hotel package, for which I was thankful; I tend to eat too much mediocre food, just because it’s there, blowing my calories much too early in the day. We noted a cheese shop near to the hotel with an offer of belegte broodje met koffie, filled rolls and coffee. What more do you need, really? I chickened out and ordered in English, though, too scared of making a mistake. The choices were old, young and mild cheese; we got a young and an old, and I’m afraid I didn’t write down the names. The coffee, by the way, although obviously not the focus of the shop, was spot on, as would be each of the subsequent cups we drank in Amsterdam. How do they do that?

We had a good chunk of time that morning to explore the city centre, the Dam (main square), the red light district (how could I not? I’m a public health professional after all) and the Oude Kerk, the old church – right smack in the middle of the red light district, and there’s even a statue of a sex worker on the grounds. A classy little bakery with pretty sweets and really good bread was a few steps away, and we stopped in for an almond-curl biscuit, amandelkrull – I got an approving nod from the baker for sounding out the word correctly. Result! OK, that was an easy one. How about koekje? Am I right in guessing that this should be pronounced, approximately, ‘cookie’? We didn’t spend as much time in patisseries scrutinising the koekjes as we should have. Given that each cup of coffee was accompanied by a different one, I suspect that there is a whole new world out there. Anyway, here’s a pic of the window of the bakery in the red-light district:

Let's call it Munchies Bakery, since I can't remember what it was really called.

While we shared our amandelkrull and drank coffee, a young American guy came in. The proprietor threw a wry, knowing (but not unkind) glance to his assistant that said ‘You want to take this one?’ American guy proceeded to order, rather passionately, a brownie and a slice of carrot cake, at 11 am. It seems the many cannabis coffeeshops in the area are good for business.

That afternoon, after a light, leisurely lunch back in the Vondelpark – it’s so easy to get around! – with a friend and her lovely twin babbies, we braved threatening skies and headed over to the Jewish History Museum. We walked via the somewhat disappointing flower market – mostly tourist souvenirs, at this point, and to be honest (eek, don’t hate me!) I don’t even like tulips all that much. But if I lived there, I might pick up a few perennials. Amazingly, though cannabis seeds were on sale everywhere, I don’t believe I saw any growing, anywhere. (Perhaps it’s grown indoors? I ask purely out of theoretical interest, honest.)

One thing we knew we wanted to try in Amsterdam was Indonesian food, which seems to take the place of Britain’s Indian restaurants, since Indonesia was for a long time a Dutch colony. Our friend referred us to Orient, a family-run business near the famous Concertgebouw and the big art museums. Wednesday was buffet night, which made it easy to try many dishes – the equivalent of a rijstaffel? I managed not to overeat, but I could have done quite happily.

Bloemenmarkt

We shared a fabulously buttery almond croissant, nabbed earlier in the day, on the way back to the hotel. Perfect.

Thursday morning rained buckets on Amsterdam, so it was a good day to hit the museums, but first, breakfast. We had to try Bagels and Beans, if only because it looked like an inviting place for a sit-down. The menu was great, the coffee was again lovely, and some American students were happy to share the shop’s wifi password with us. The only disappointment with the breakfast was, I’m afraid, with the bagels themselves. They lacked that boiled, chewy quality and were somehow a bit crumbly.

Never mind; we survived, and were fed, and braved the queues for the Rijksmuseum. Delftware, check; Old Masters, check (except for the Vermeers, which were in The Hague); celebration of faded imperial glory, check. Truly, though, we love old Rembrandt – he’s a Master for good reason – and it was exciting to experience his work in person.

For lunch Thursday we wandered around the canals in search of a recommended sandwich shop. The wander was worthwhile in itself, but when we got to the shop, there was truly nothing on the long, mostly meat menu I really wanted, and the bread was only just meh.

A Delft violin, with strings and all. I can only imagine it sounds pretty weird.

Andrew bought one and I abstemiously settled on tangy frozen yogurt with berries, in preparation for the inevitable afternoon attack of the friet. We sneakily borrowed a seat outside the yogurt shop where I made myself available to help Andrew consume the biggest, sloppiest sandwich we’d ever seen, a takeaway item that really should have come with its own table, plate, cutlery and napkins.

Which brings me to the topic of mayonnaise. I love the stuff, but not as much as the Dutch do. It’s everywhere! The supermarket deli/ready-meal section we visited had shelves and shelves of mostly mayo salads and sandwiches. As noted above it’s the default topping for friet. Where do they put it all? Why are Amsterdammers not fat? I can only assume it’s because they cycle everywhere.

I found something better than mayo, or even ketchup (another Indonesian word!), for friet. After circling back around to the Portuguese synagogue, which we hadn’t fit in the day before, I did indeed get drawn in by the ubiquitous friet. This time, though, on a hunch, I asked if one of the sauces on offer was peanut-flavoured and, sure enough, I got satay, a rich, dark, sweetish, slightly spicy sauce that was better than those particular friet to be honest.

I wish I’d gotten a larger portion, but it was just as well I didn’t, as dinner – tapas, at Sal Gorda, not far from our hotel – was very filling indeed (the restaurant is much prettier than the website). And even though my Dutch is nonexistent, our lovely waiter was only too happy to speak Spanish! We had the classics here: marinated anchovies, Merguez sausage, a big bowl of olives, patatas bravas (with more mayo, natch), shrimp in garlic sauce, and more. As it was still light, I forgot it was 9 pm and ordered a cappuccino (just to go wash down the crema Catalana of course); amazingly, it didn’t keep me awake.

Friday morning – our last morning – was again rainy, and we breakfasted at Le Pain Quotidien, a Belgian chain that’s really very good, though I did find myself wondering if there was a seamy underbelly. They sell beautiful sourdough loaves, but when I asked the waiter if he’d had a chance to make them, he admitted that the loaves are prepared and shaped elsewhere, and only baked in the local shop. Fair enough…I suppose. It is a chain after all.

We weren’t sure these were the loaves we wanted to bring home, though, so we poked our heads in a few shops in this (very posh) neighbourhood and ended up in an organic grocery, where we bought a sourdough nut loaf and some young geitekaas (goats’ cheese), having previously bought some aged geitekaas, quite different, at a shop in town. And with our last few euros – luckily they didn’t take credit cards as we could’ve done some serious damage here – we bought some fruit jellies for Andrew’s mum, in the most beautiful sweet shop you’ve ever seen, Van Avezaath-Beune.

Café at Schiphol Airport. These wooden loaves looked better than the actual bread, unfortunately, but they had good coffee and free mini-stroopwaffels.

Amsterdam, we love you and will be back, armed with a better knowledge of Dutch… there is so much more to eat!

Banoffee Pi for Pi Day 2011

Inspiration for making this pi(e) hit me so fast I’m not even sure how I got there. I’d been looking for an idea for Serious Eats’ Pi Day baking contest (14 March, 3.14, Pi, get it?) for a week or so, and next thing I knew, I was looking at four ripe bananas in the kitchen and googling up a recipe from Carnation for Banoffee Pie. This pie is almost as popular on British menus these days as is Sticky Toffee Pudding and, judging from the recipe  about as sticky sweet. I’d never even tried eating it, but figured there was nothing in there – cream, bananas, toffee – to dislike.

So even though Purim and St Patrick’s Day are also this week and involve treats I shouldn’t be eating, I had to do it. It’s not even baking – ok, some of is cooked – but I could see it was one of those things that’s over and done with before my better judgment kicks in. More importantly, I had a plan for incorporating ∏ into the design, which I didn’t do last year; hence, no prize for me.

This year, though…

This is not a difficult thing to make; it’s really just a digestive-biscuit unbaked crust, a toffee layer made by boiling together butter, brown sugar, and sweetened condensed milk, some chopped bananas and whipped cream whacked on, and a bit of grated chocolate. I’m particularly happy with my banana-work. Really, though, no great wisdom to impart here today I’m afraid. But it’s a pretty Pi, isn’t it? Get it, Pi(e)?

Right, I’ll get my coat.

Happy St David’s Day

St David (Dewi Sant) is the patron saint of Wales, and he lived, oh, around the 6th century. I really wanted to make raisin-y little Welsh cakes today to celebrate the holiday, but couldn’t find one of these:

None of the modern cooking stores seem to offer much cookware that’s not non-stick, let alone cast iron (at least unenameled), even though it’s one of the best materials there is for durability and even heat distribution.

Welsh cakes are also called bakestones (another name, too, for the heavy iron griddle), or griddle scones, and in Welsh are picau ar y maen which I don’t know how to pronounce. They are like English scones in composition, but obviously are baked differently. Here’s someone else’s recipe and perhaps by next St David’s Day I will have myself sorted and make them so I can offer my own recipe, and a photo.

Until then, Dydd Gwyl Dewi hapus!

Cambridge pizza comes in from the cold

Home-delivered pizza in Cambridge, UK, tends to be mass-produced/commercial (Pizza Hut and Domino’s are taking over the world), or downright weird: really, tuna and corn? And the only dough or shells available are either ridiculously overpriced or laden with creepy chemicals. You can’t go to your neighborhood pizzeria and grab a blob of dough for a buck and a half, or even a pound; they’d just look at you funny.

So because of all that it’s been good to have an excuse to work on crusts. I’ve played with recipes from Alice Waters and Dan Lepard and have gotten incrementally better results each time in terms of flavor, texture, and – a repeated bugbear – ease of dough-handling. One recipe others on Serious Eats swore by had me swearing as well – and not in a good way; this was particularly galling to me at a time when my other bread efforts were paying attractive dividends.

Finally, a beautifully geeky recipe from Slice’s brilliant J. Kenji Lopez-Alt involving cold fermentation produced crust nirvana. I started the dough on Saturday evening, went off to Manchester the next morning for two days, and on Tuesday evening set about making pizza. A few important points: I was happy to use some Tipo 00 flour I had in the house. For Kenji’s kneading instructions I substituted Dan Lepard’s, which involves three cycles of kneading for 10-12 seconds followed by a 10 minute rest; sounds weird, but it works. I now use it in any bread recipe involving yeast or sourdough for which hand-kneading is an option. And I hesitate to admit that I may or may not have tossed a dollop of sourdough in with my dough – I simply can’t remember.

Anyway, the results were great; I’ve never had an easier time working with pizza dough. I took the dough out of the fridge , cut it into four individual pizza-appropriate volumes, rolled them into tidy balls, and after letting those rest for 10 minutes, easily coaxed two of them into circles. They didn’t spring back annoyingly upon contact with dusted flour, and obligingly stretched on a flat surface through hand-pressure – with a bit of rolling to get them evenly thin – and, miraculously, produced the exalted windowpane thinness in the middle without tearing. I was happy not to have to fall back on baking paper for easy transport. The constructed pizza slid easily from the back of a nonstick baking tray.

The oven was cranked to 550°F (225°C), or as high as I could get it, really, and the pizza stone was on the middle shelf. I missed the instruction in Kenji’s recipe about using the broiler, but it didn’t matter; I didn’t get the small, black blistering, but the texture of the crust was otherwise perfect: crisp then chewy around the edges, with no breadiness, and thin, crisp, and tender but not soggy in the middle.

I was also happy to have found some nice semi-fresh mozzarella that could be sliced from the block, ideal for a pizza.

Dad’s plum torte

There were far too many choices for baking with plums in the past week or two. First, @Dan_Lepard tweeted what appeared to be his first recipe in the Guardian, a cobnut and plum tart. Then @Zebbakes sent around a link to a lovely recipe for stone fruit yogurt cake with plums (based on one of Dan’s) in her blog. The next day, Nigel Slater’s single-crust plum pie appeared in the Observer Food Monthly. Meanwhile I had bought a kilo of the things at the Cambridge market. Where to begin?

I couldn’t decide, and was busy making other things, so the plums sat in the fridge until today, when I remembered a favorite recipe of my father’s that he had emailed me once, and that I had never made. In the end, guilt and family loyalty won, but I think both were worth it, and it really was easy. Here’s his recipe, which he adapted from one in the NY Times; I’ve added in a few metric equivalents.

Plum Torte

1 cup (200 g) sugar, maybe a little less
1/2 cup (60 g) sweet butter (ordinary salted butter will do)
1 cup (110 g) unbleached (plain) flour, sifted
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp vanilla (I’ve been using vanilla bean paste for everything these days, really good stuff)
pinch salt
2 eggs
~24 halves pitted purple plums (mine were bigger than Italian prune plums, so I used fewer)

topping: sugar, lemon juice (or brandy), cinnamon

Preheat oven to 350°F (175°C).

1. Cream the sugar and butter. Add the flour, baking powder, vanilla, salt, and eggs, and beat well.

2. Spoon the batter into a 9 inch (23 cm) spring form, or into a 10 inch (25 cm) pan with a disc of parchment inide. Place the plum halves skin side up on top of the batter. Sprinkle lightly with sugar and lemon juice, depending on the sweetness of the fruit. Sprinkle with cinnamon to taste.

3. Bake for one hour. Remove and cool; refrigerate or freeze if desired. Or cool to lukewarm and serve plain or with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream (or double cream or custard if you live in the UK!).

4. To serve frozen tortes, defrost and reheat briefly at 300°F (150°C).

Yield: 8 servings

This very elementary recipe also works well with other fruits, including fresh raspberries. The fruit sinks into the batter during the baking process.

This week’s veg box, at the very end of summer

Here’s what I got with this week’s veg box scheme. Every week I get portions of potatoes, carrots, mushrooms, and onions, plus a handful of other vegetables, though I can swap some of those if need be. So this week I swapped out potatoes and carrots – because I have accumulations of both I need to use up – and the sum total is three tomatoes, two leeks, yellow onions, fennel, a bag of ‘spring greens’ (? They look rather like collards, less wrinkly than kale), an ear of corn (just one? really?), two large portobello shrooms instead of one, and a zucchini/courgette. To the left (just out of sight, sorry) are a couple of pounds of plums I got from a vendor in the market square. And there’s half a large cabbage in the fridge, along with the remains of borscht from last week’s beetroot.

I shall apply my veggie kabbala meditation to this collection and see what I come up with. I think I could easily use a number of these items in one swoop. We’re having company for dinner on Monday – a Belgian gentleman with, I think, sophisticated taste – so there may be some kind of veggie and fish chowder in the offing. Andrew loves mushrooms so I may even delegate to him the mushrooms on toast recipe in today’s Guardian feature of student recipes by celebrity chefs (one of the few among the bunch that doesn’t have bacon in it!). And the plums? Well, still haven’t figured out what to do with those, because there are too many choices, frankly. But they’re going in the fridge pronto, as they’re starting to ooze juice (yum).